Infant and Child Development

Inf. Child. Dev. 19: 553–556 (2010)

Published online in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/icd.716

Introduction

Special Issue on the Content and

Context of Early Media Exposure
Rachel Barr and Deborah L. Linebarger

Exposing infants to screen media is a hotly debated topic. Part of the debate
stems from perceived inconsistencies in the accumulated evidence. Correlational
research has provided a number of associations between exposure and outcomes
(both positive and negative; for review see Courage & Howe, 2010). Experimental
evidence shows that when learning conditions are equated infants learn less from
video than from live face-to-face interactions (i.e. video deficit, Anderson &
Pempek, 2005). As the research literature has accumulated, however, it has
shifted from simple main effects models to more complex interaction models of
analysis. This complexity is captured through the analysis of three distinct but
inter-connected classes of variables that mediate and moderate the relationship
between exposure and child outcomes: child attributes, stimulus features, and
the contexts in which exposure occur (see Linebarger & Vaala, 2010).
There are two main purposes of this special issue: (1) empirically demonstrate
the shift away from research that examines simplistic cause and effect models to
research that examines the causal mechanisms underlying how effects are pro-
duced (Clark, 1983; Dupré & Cartwright, 1988; Hedström & Ylikoski, 2010;
Kozma, 1994) and (2) focus on an ecological perspective and, as such, simulta-
neously consider the effects of content and context of early media exposure.
Cause and effect models presume that learning is a receptive response to content
delivery whereas models that incorporate causal mechanism-based explanations
view learning as an active cognitive process influenced by the social, affective,
and contextual variables present during a specific learning event (Clark, 1983).
Defining causal mechanisms involves articulating the intersection among the
child, the environmental context, and the ways in which both influence how
a child ultimately interprets and learns from program content. An ecological
perspective provides a way to conceptualize these processes as ‘substantive and
theoretical[ly] significant’ (p. 626, Bronfenbrenner, 1995). It is these transactions
that drive development and these transactions that are both affected by
characteristics of the child and of the context in which these transactions occur.

From Cause and Effect to Causal Mechanism

In 2008, we partnered to develop and implement a field-based longitudinal
study. The difference between this study and earlier research by both of our labs

*Correspondence to: Rachel Barr, Department of Psychology, Georgetown University,

Washington, DC 20057, USA. E-mail: rfb5@georgetown.edu

Copyright r 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

554 R. Barr and D.L. Linebarger

(Barr, 2008, 2010; Linebarger & Walker, 2005) is that we designed the study as an
experimental intervention. This design was selected because we wanted to
investigate the underlying structure and functions of media exposure. Given the
serious and sometimes contentious debate surrounding infants’ potential
exposure to screen media content, it was crucial that the intervention develop-
ment process be grounded in scientifically rigorous research. Focus on the delivery
system alone leads to simple cause and effect explanations whereas the method of
instruction (i.e. content and the structural features used to convey that content and
context of viewing) offers much more powerful explanatory models for the
observed effects (Clark, 1983; Kozma, 1994). For instance, early viewing (age 5) of
Sesame Street predicted higher grades and more leisure book reading in adolescence
while early viewing of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood predicted higher creativity scores
(Anderson, Huston, Schmitt, Linebarger, & Wright, 2001). Consistent with this
argument we hypothesize that associations between early media exposure and
infant development are determined by both content and context.

Content and Context in Learning from Infant-Directed Media

After articulating a causal pathway, the next step was to conduct a detailed
content analysis of infant-directed media. The first step in the content analysis
involved the generation of a series of coding schemes that captured key
characteristics of supportive learning opportunities in live interactions to use as
a starting point to examine developmental appropriateness of DVD content.
These coding schemes examined a number of macro-level features of the DVDs
including the educational claims made by content producers, the degree of match
between these claims and actual content (Fenstermacher et al., a this volume),
and the presence of quality of depicted interactions between adult–child and
child–child characters (Fenstermacher et al., b this volume). Micro-level features
included the identification of the formal features used to structure program
content (see Goodrich, Pempek, & Calvert, 2009) and the presence and quality of
language-promoting strategies that support these skills when engaging with
similar content delivered via other media forms (e.g., books, free play, classrooms,
language interventions; Vaala et al., this volume). Results based on these content
analyses indicate that the majority of infant products are structurally similar.
Content is most often conveyed outside the context of adult–child or peer-to-peer
interactions. Without such support, it can be especially challenging for infants to
make sense of content, regardless of the media forms that were used to present the
content (Fenstermacher et al., b this volume). Most of the micro-level strategies that
we found in infant-directed content (e.g., simple descriptive talk and labeling)
promoted lower-order content processing that consequently may result in the
formation of developmentally unsophisticated conceptual and vocabulary knowl-
edge understanding (Vaala et al., this volume). These findings are not necessarily
incompatible with the exposure - outcomes simple main effects models; however,
those models do little to explain why these relationships exist. Without knowledge
of the underlying causal mechanisms, it is difficult to determine what types of
content and which structural features can create developmentally appropriate
content and optimal learning situations.
To answer these questions contextual factors need to be examined. Therefore,
three additional studies in this volume focus on the context of media exposure
complementing the detailed content analysis. In each study, the researchers
tested the influence of specific content (Allen & Scofield, this volume) or

Copyright r 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Inf. Child. Dev. 19: 553–556 (2010)
DOI: 10.1002/icd
Special Issue on the Content and Context of Early Media Exposure 555

contextual variables in the context of intervention studies (Fender, Rickert, Robb,

& Wartella, this volume; Mendelsohn et al., this volume) on word learning and
language development. These findings demonstrate that parents are likely to be
important mediators of infant language development in the context of co-viewing
(Fender et al., this volume) and may also moderate potential negative impacts of
different types of media content (Mendelsohn et al., this volume). Toddlers also
show word learning from television when the production features of the content
are quite minimal (Allen & Scofield, this volume), suggesting once again that the
structure of the media content, as well as the way that learning is measured are
important factors in understanding language outcomes as a function of media
exposure. These studies are strong examples of the types of research that will
advance our understanding of the causal mechanisms responsible for important
developmental outcomes such as language. While the sequence of events that
occur between exposure and outcome will be governed by a number of regula-
rities, this sequence is not rigidly bound by these regularities (Dupré &
Cartwright, 1988). Part of the process associated with determining the causal
chain from exposure - outcome is determining whether and where content-
based and contextual factors will manifest their influence.
Kozma (1994) writes that the ‘foundational assumptions and goals that guidey
research are shifting from a view of the world as a set of law-like relations between
observable causes and effects that act uniformly across situations to a world of
interacting causes that join together to produce events’ (p. 15). He argued this
perspective as a way to move media effects research from whether media do
influence learning to whether media will influence learning. While his analysis was
based on educational technology and school-age children, the underlying premise
is applicable to any research that is concerned with explaining the sequence of
events or conditions that lead children on a path from exposure to outcomes.
This special issue focuses on the shift in the literature away from simple main
effects models that offer only associations between exposure and outcomes, toward
complex models that include the myriad of factors interacting and influencing
developmental outcomes and specification of the causal mechanisms that drive
associations between exposure and outcomes.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The contents of this document were developed in part under a cooperative

agreement between the US Department of Education, the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, and the Public Broadcasting System for the Ready to Learn
Initiative (PR No. U295A050003) with Deborah Linebarger (and a subcontract to
Rachel Barr). Disclaimer: This content does not necessarily represent the policy of
the Department of Education and should not be assumed to be endorsed by the
federal government.

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Copyright r 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Inf. Child. Dev. 19: 553–556 (2010)
DOI: 10.1002/icd